Last night I watched "The Prisoner of Zenda." Both versions. One of my favorite scenes is when the fake King is scaling the castle wall after having a swim in the moat.

There's been a lot of talk recently about POWER7 scaling. Scaling is very important because it shows us what a system can really do, whether it's a small system or a system at the very high end.

It is imperative to stick with the same system when you are doing your scaling analysis -- the same system, chip, GHz, system software, benchmark. If you don't, you're not getting the true scaling ratio. As an example, look at SPECfp_rate2006 on the Power 780 as you go from 16 cores to 64 cores. The scaling ratio is over 95%. (1) I saw a comment on this recently from one of my favorite analysts - "No other system on the planet can scale . . . at that close of a linear scaling ratio."

"Fate doesn't always make the right men kings." In this case, the right man and the right systems scaled the wall.

I live pretty far from the ocean. And a thousand miles from Texas. But I was without power for the last 50 hours because of Hurricane Ike.

At least it wasn't sub-zero January. And it certaintly wasn't as bad for me as those in our community who needed power for their wells and had no power and no clean water. And it certainly wasn't as bad here as in Texas. Probably the worst parts here were a refrigerator full of food going bad and no power for the laptop.

It was important to look on the bright side. We took long night time walks. We read much more. And best of all, we got enough hours of sleep for once.

In my last blog entry before the outage, I wrote lightly about HP and their lack of industry standard benchmarks for their 24 hours of computer battery time. What I would have given yesterday for 24 hours of computer battery time. Or even 4.

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As the cost of power grows significantly and data centers start to need more power than they have available, consolidation and virtualization become important energy management strategies for corporations around the world. IBM has long been a champion of energy efficiency and the new IBM System z10 is an outstanding platform for the integration of power efficiency and performance. A new white paper demonstrates the IBM System z10 as an excellent system for power efficiency and performance, discusses server consolidation and virtualization implementation and strategies, and highlights a power benchmarking study on this platform.

************************************************The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management.

Today Sun announced the SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers - the first servers using the new UltraSPARC T2 processor.

Sun compares an SAP SD T5120 benchmark to an IBM System p 570 POWER6 result - but, amazingly, the footnote about this claim is all about the HP rx6600. What's going on here? Maybe the footnote is about the HP system because in reality the POWER6 p570 achieves 1.84 times more performance than the T5120.(1)

Sun compares a T5220 Notesbench result to the IBM System x3650, a configuration that is half the number of cores and more than 2.6 times less memory.(2)

Sun compares other vendors' power configurator values and maximum power values to Sun's actual power measurements from their benchmarks. Not exactly apples to apples is it ?

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